Straw Man #3
Given the increased inter-disciplinarily nature of many emerging fields, it is clear that individual departments are not able to offer the “right” program for undergraduate or graduate preparation in these fields. A good example is “Cybersecurity” which transcends computer science, international relations, sociology, psychology, economics, etc. Even within a single discipline (such as computer science), there is need to cover very different topics (e.g., crypto, network security, privacy, data mining, natural language processing, ….) Due to the range of disciplines they touch and even the range of topics within a single discipline, it is seldom the case that one finds a reputable program or degree in “Cybersecurity” (or “Big Data” or “Digital Journalism”, … This is the case even though there is huge demand for such specializations. The advent of on-line technologies and the increased acceptance of MOOCs offer a unique opportunity to develop a platform for combining assets (mostly faculty expertise and existing courses) from a self-selecting consortium of universities to address this need. The main point is that a single university (however big and reputable it is) cannot alone provide the diversity of top-rated courses to fill the need.
Questions:
- What might a platform supporting this vision look like?
- What would be the economic model?
- Who would offer the degree when a consortium of universities is involved?
- What current BU resources could be leveraged to support such a transformation? Are any of these resources unique to BU? What new resources would be needed?
- What might an experiment (or sets of experiments) to test the possibility of adopting such a platform look like?
November 4, 2012
The question is too short-sited and hence partially misses the point. Just like you can get any author’s book or musician’s music from several of only a very few different online stores, in the near future, you may be able to get any course from one of a few MOOC delivery platforms. Thus the idea of working to partner across several university’s and build consortia where we worry about who gives who credit and who admits the students and who gives the degree at the end is going to largely moot (no pun intended).
Taking this statement as true (it is certainly open to argument), then any university can design their own degree, choosing from a set of MOOCs. Such flexibility to create hybrid degree programs will be available in the very near term, and in fact individual departments could, in principle start doing this. They could build and propose an accreditation and credentialing approach, describe the course components, and get started. We should encourage and support BU departments to do this now. Nothing in this approach will be unique to BU. First to market with a high quality product is all that matters and the advantage won’t last.
Backing off a bit from this approach, and blending local in-person expertise for cross-university learning communities would be more powerful, more unique, and perhaps more interesting. MIT, Harvard, and BU could join to create a degree in Cybersecurity that combines traditional courses, MOOCs, and local, face-to-face learning communities. The challenge here is not on the MOOC side of things, but all the traditional barriers. These barriers sometimes get solved, and such consortia exist in some fields (don’t we have a program with BC and somewhere else in CAS?), but they never grow very large.
November 4, 2012
The main point is that a single university (however big and reputable it is) cannot alone provide the diversity of top-rated courses to fill the need.
How true is this?
Clearly at least some interdisciplinary courses or majors can be constructed out of the diverse expertise that BU already has. It’s worth generating examples of interdisciplinary majors and/or interdisciplinary courses and identify which ones can be done with BU’s resources and which can’t.
We need examples of inter-disciplinary courses outside of computer-science fields. Examples will also help us understand more about this straw man. For example, one of my advisees is a psychology major and international relations minor. She says she hopes to draw on both of these fields in her future career, as in advising policy makers on promoting child welfare in an international context. Is this what we are talking about? So my advisee should be able to design a unique major with courses that includes classes on international adoption laws, legal and global marketing approaches to combating child trafficking, and similar things that the student opted for.
Is this what our straw man concerns? If so, then one could imagine designing this major by sampling different MOOCs as Bennett says in the prior msg, plus some courses from diverse depts as BU, with a couple instances of cross-registering at other local colleges. I agree with Bennett the question about which university would offer the degree might not be relevant.
November 4, 2012
As Bennett said, “We should encourage and support BU departments to do this now.”
Convincing depts to create hybrid degree programs on a massive scale will be a big job. Every few years in the psych dept the idea of curriculum reform comes up. Reform means: specifying what courses are required for the major. But in 20 years, the single change implemented occurred 5 or so years ago, and that was to drop a history-of-science class requirement. There has not been a lot of imagination about what alternatives could be, probably because of if-it-aint-broken thinking. The ideas we are discussing would be a shake-up, but possibly welcome, especially if it was understood that all undergraduate majors are going in this direction.
A possible scheme for undergraduate majors could be to let students could choose one of three options.
1. The traditional approach (essentially what each dept has in place now) of a set of prereq courses, principles courses, supporting courses, and electives.
2. A set of specialized majors (some interdisciplinary, but not all have to be) that have already been worked out. Students could just pick one and pursue it or tweak it. An example from my prior post is: “child welfare in an international context.” Faculty would create these, possibly drawing on successfully self-designed majors from prior years. New ones would be added as more students design their own.
3. Design your own major from scratch, using a mix of MOOCs, live and blended classrooms and courses outside of BU.
November 6, 2012
Can we relate MOOC content to books authored by faculty at other universities? Or research papers adopted in courses? One model is to consider specialized content in smaller units to comprise single courses at BU. A value-add is to assemble diverse MOOC content into a cohesive course or program. But with BU extracting it’s $ for the facilitation.
Can this scale to a curriculum? Maybe if BU provides sufficient content to the MOOC universe.
November 7, 2012
QUESTION #1: What might a platform supporting this vision look like?
The platform will bring together students, content producers, course producers and employers.
Content. The platform will allow anybody (professor, student, individual) to contribute “content.” Content can be any resource that can be used in teaching, e.g a video lecture, a paper, a problem set, a data set, a simulation software, etc. The platform will act as a repository of such content with appropriate classification and search capabilities.
Courses. The platform will allow anybody to contribute a “course.” I think of a course as a curated collection of content resources, together with a sequence and an evaluation model. Think of this as a “playlist” on YouTube or iTunes, but of course, much more complex. For example, a “course” may be a defined as a set of rules that adapt the flow of content interactively, depending on how well the student demonstrates mastery.
Certifications. The platform will also allow anybody to contribute a “certification.” A certification designates a set of courses, with specific thresholds for performance, and potentially other prerequisites ranging from taking an exam at a physical location to demonstrating expertise through a certain level of presence at an online site, such as stackoverflow.
Reputation System. The platform will have a feedback/reputation system that can be used to evaluate individual content pieces, courses and certifications and will help users find the content, courses and certifications that are most relevant to them.
Employers. Employers will be able to sponsor or endorse certifications- or even create their own certifications.
The main disruptive effect of such a platform will be the unbundling of content, courses and certification. Anyone can contribute pieces of content, anyone can combine them into courses and anyone can combine a number of such courses AND other requirements into certifications. The platform will take power away from individual universities.
QUESTION #2: What would be the economic model?
Standard platform economics. The platform will charge one or more parties a commission on some or all transactions performed through it, depending on what makes most sense (platform economic math can help us figure this out).
For example:
Platform charges students per “course.” Platform gives a commission to the author of the “course” as well as to the producers of individual content pieces. (Each of them is also allowed to set a price, the same way that Harvard sets a price for cases and this prices influences the price of course packs.)
Platform also charges per certification – again the certification owner can set a price.
Platform generates analytics that it can also sell to employers, course developers, content producers and policy/research organizations.
People contributing evaluations may get something – e.g. credits to apply towards courses.
QUESTION #3: Who would offer the degree when a consortium of universities is involved.
I am not even sure that the notion of a “degree” will make sense anymore. I believe what will make sense is the more general notion of “certification”, a special case of which might be a “degree”. The market will choose which certifications become more popular.
The third party who proposes the “certification” will offer it – see the certification part in question #1 above. This third party could be a single university, a university consortium, an employer or any other entity.
QUESTION #4: What current BU resources could be leveraged to support such a transformation? Are any of these resources unique to BU? What new resources will be needed?
I am afraid that places like BU will lose power when this happens. Best thing we can do is to partner with a set of universities and start such a platform ourselves as equity partners. Then we can try to restrict content, courses and certifications to those produced by the platform members. If history is any guide, however, I think that an open model that allows contribution of content, courses and certification models by anyone (including amateurs who develop awesome materials out of their own passion – think Sal Khan!!!) will dominate.
QUESTION #5: What might be an experiment (or sets of experiments) to test the possibility of adopting such a platform look like?
1. Build a platform that is internal to BU and give incentives to faculty across the university to contribute any resources (videos, exercises, papers, simulations) on cross-cutting topics, such as cybersecurity, analytics, big data, digital journalism. Define a mechanism for putting together courses by mixing and matching resources and allow students to get credit for taking such courses. Partner with employers to make sure what we do makes sense to them.
2. Something similar but as a partnership across regional universities.
November 8, 2012
Dear Chris:
I think you are right on many levels, but I have two major points of disagreement:
1. I believe your vision is one that will take a significant amount of time to realize. Universities move slowly, so do departments, as Catherine says above. Your vision assumes we have already moved past the test-stages of limited consortia and are part of an open source i-University platform where there is complete freedom of the student population to determine the value of the product, with providers and content organizers responding to student performance and perceived value. I don’t think this will evolve for the next 15 years. Perhaps as we approach 2020. Our task in the Council is to advise Bob what to do right now, and what to look towards in the short term, say 5 years, with an eye of course to the less predictable longer term and strategic positioning.
2. My second point of disagreement is that a HUGE part of the challenge is the ‘rules’ used to ‘sequence content’ or ‘curated collection of content resources’ is the major challenge of good pedagogy. The content doesn’t really matter, it is the pedagogy that does. The analogy with a playlist makes the point exactly, if we counterpoint with a song: A composer or song writer doesn’t just sequence a set of notes or organize a set of instruments. A moviemaker never simply edits scenes together from an infinite archive of scenes. Ok, perhaps a couple do…Every good course developer and instructor has nearly a complete command of the content already (like a song writer or composer) and applies his or her art in the design of the student interactions, the amount of peer learning that is necessary, the timing to achieve the ‘ah ha’ moments, and the specific learning gains. This isn’t to say that we don’t use content that is freely available, we do: I use slide and clicker questions from several websites, simulations from Colorado, and an occasional problem from Cornell. But access to good content isn’t the problem, training faculty in the pedagogy necessary to put it together into a course is.
My sense is that there will always be some early adopters who gain the skill necessary to use your platform as a course builder, but it will be very few, at least for the next decade.
Bennett
November 8, 2012
It looks like there is no common time (Chris, I can’t make your times). But it would be good to confer before the big meeting– what if we try to get to the Nov 14 meeting 10 min or so before noon and sit together — those who can’t come a few min early, look for our group so we can rapidly organize our ideas. Chris’ post may be about the future (2020 as Bennett says) but we can mix Bennet’s points in. It seem like it wold be good for the whole council to read and discuss.
Of course some more ideas for consensus can be proposed on the discussion board. I confess I don’t have any but appreciate learning from Chris and Bennett.
Catherine
November 13, 2012
Having recently been part of a curriculum redesign effort at STH, I want to echo Bennett’s point about how slowly universities change. Chris has articulated a good vision of what a platform might be. I don’t think, however, that the platform is the limiting factor. The expectations for what entail good curricula and good pedagogy are formed by our culture here at BU as well as disciplinary expectations. They are not easily changed, at least not simply by the introduction of a new technology platform.
I hesitate to dwell too early on practical issues such as library resources to support teaching and learning. I would note, however, that the Libraries currently license most of the online content for the exclusive use of BU students, faculty and staff. Current license agreements prevent us from making such content accessible in a MOOC environment open beyond the BU community. An important part of the platform would be mechanisms to control access to licensed resources, or better, radically re-negotiated license agreements. I think we need new economic models for how we make such resources available to our students.